Metaio, the Germany augmented reality firm, says it expects to have its dedicated chips in mobile devices by year-end, despite the collapse of its one big announced customer, ST-Ericsson. The outfit has also revealed the opening of a new R&D lab in Dallas, Texas.

The company announced the ST-Ericsson deal at Mobile World Congress in February. ST-Ericsson’s future chipsets were to include a dedicated augmented reality (AR) processor using Metaio’s designs – much as is the case with the dedicated GPUs we find in mobile devices today, the benefit of a dedicated AR chip is to cut down the power-draw required by specific functions, in this case augmented reality, so people can fire up applications using those functions without worrying about their phone or tablet dying too quickly.